Tag Archives: Frankenstein

The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty Second Century by Jane Webb, later Jane Loudon, was published in 1827. Loudon was twenty upon its publication but said she wrote it at seventeen. Written in typical three-volume format for the period, it is a remarkable book to have been written by one so young. Nor is it the kind of horror novel we would expect from watching Universal horror films or even the more recent Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise mummy films.

The novel was clearly inspired by Frankenstein (1818), but its similarities to Mary Shelley’s later novel The Last Man (1826) cannot go unnoticed even though Loudon may not have read The Last Man since she said she had written it by 1824 (although The Last Man was published in 1826, the year before The Mummy!’s publication). In the novel, a young noble, Edric Montague, and his tutor, Dr. Entwerfen, debate whether a corpse can be brought back to life through galvanism (use of electricity). They come to the conclusion it is possible and decide to travel to Egypt to find a body that is not decayed to experiment upon; consequently, a mummy is the perfect specimen. I’ll get to what happens next in a minute, but clearly Loudon read Frankenstein and was inspired by it to come up with a new way to bring a body back to life. The similarities to Frankenstein end there.

This edition of The Mummy!, published by Two Penny Books, seeks to appeal to a modern audience by making the mummy look frightening but he is actually fully preserved and looks human other than his piercing eyes in the novel.

While it is questionable that Loudon read The Last Man, The Mummy! has far more similarities to The Last Man than Frankenstein. Mary Shelley begins The Last Man in the Sibyl’s cave where the narrator collects leaves and combines them together to create the novel’s text. It is a strange history of the future set at the end of the twenty-first century. In The Mummy!, the narrator claims that when in a state of being half-asleep, a spirit appeared and gave her a scroll upon which was chronicled a future age. In both cases, a supernatural being provides a tale of the future. Loudon sets her novel a bit later than Shelley, opening in the year 2126. Shelley’s novel spans the 2070s-2100 when Lionel Verney, the last man alive after a plague has destroyed the human race, writes his history. Loudon doesn’t let a plague destroy mankind, although she does allow the Mummy to wreak havoc upon people as if he were a type of plague. Shelley was not too far-seeing in her use of technological innovations in her novels—her characters travel in hot air balloons, but that is hardly far-seeing. Characters already did so in an early French novel of the same name by Cousin de Grainville, published in 1804. (See my previous blog on Grainville’s The Last Man.)

Loudon is far more technologically advanced. Not only do her characters travel in hot air balloons, but they also have built an underwater tunnel between England and Ireland (think chunnel) and women wear hairpieces that have flames in them. Perhaps more importantly, political situations have evolved, although regressed might be a better word. In Shelley’s novel, the King of England has abdicated and the country become more democratic. In Loudon’s novel, revolutions of the masses overthrowing their masters led to anarchy and a return to absolute monarchy. However, now only women may rule. A queen is elected by the people and she is forbidden to marry. When she dies, another young woman, between the ages of 20-25 in the royal family, takes her place. Also of significance is that the country has returned to Catholicism—this last point is fascinating because while Loudon sets her novel 300 years into the future, she is recreating the England of the past in an absolute monarchy and Catholic nation. This is really backward rather than forward, and I believe Loudon does it to make her future as Gothic as her Gothic novel predecessors made their pasts, typically setting novels in the medieval or Renaissance period. Both Shelley’s The Last Man and Loudon’s novel are then largely concerned with political issues within England. In The Last Man, the plague causes Adrian, the rightful heir to the throne, to become the leader of the English people as they travel to warmer climates trying to survive. In The Mummy, the Mummy will manipulate events that will affect who rules England.

In one of the few scholarly articles written on the novel, “Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!: Mary Shelley Meets George Orwell, and They Go in a Balloon to Egypt,” scholar Lisa Hopkins notes several other similarities to The Last Man, including that both novels include a plague in Constantinople and a niece named Clara and seem to refer to the death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817. I did not initially catch these similarities, but they make me think that Loudon wrote the novel at seventeen in 1824 as she claimed, but then perhaps revised it after reading The Last Man since it was published the year prior to her novel. It is not unlikely she did read it since she was clearly influenced by Frankenstein, so she would have likely sought out Shelley’s later novel.

The similarities with Shelley’s novels end there. Loudon is, in many ways, very original in her work. The Mummy (most of the characters call him this, as if it’s his proper name, though his real name is Cheops) is a former pharaoh of Egypt. When he is brought to life by Edric, he is shocked and does not know what he is doing. He runs out of the pyramid and jumps into Edric and Dr. Entwerfen’s hot air balloon, and before he knows it—the balloon apparently has some sort of GPS system to return it home—he finds himself back in England. I can’t help seeing Cheops as somehow symbolic here of some sort of Eastern plague invading the country, not too far removed from how Dracula has been interpreted by some critics as a symbol of Eastern European immigrants who were flooding into England in the late nineteenth century. Dracula is set on destruction, and so is the Mummy, apparently. Like Dracula, the Mummy also has his roots in the attributes of the Wandering Jew. We are told that when he first wakes, Edric cannot tear himself away from the mummy’s “withering glance” and his eyes have a “ghastly brightness.” Similarly, the Wandering Jew, and later Dracula, has hypnotic eyes that make others succumb to his will. Once the Mummy arrives in England, we find numerous characters fearful of him and agreeing to be his slaves. The only one who seems strong-willed enough not to agree to his demands is Edric’s brother, Edmund, a great general and the hero of his country who is in love with Elvira, the recently crowned queen, although he knows he can’t marry her. (Edmund seems like one of the good guys but later his ambition will get the best of him, and the Mummy will tell him his pride and refusal to submit to him has caused his downfall.)

The political plot of the novel is a bit too complicated to try to summarize in full. Basically, the queen, Claudia, has died and Elvira has been elected queen, although her cousin, Rosabella, also campaigns for the position. Once the Mummy arrives in England, he constantly seems to play the two contending parties against each other. The chief villain in the novel is actually Father Morris, a monk, who wants to place Rosabella on the throne. The Mummy seems to be aiding Father Morris throughout the novel, yet he forbids Father Morris to poison or harm Elvira. Through a turn of events, Elvira is overthrown and Rosabella becomes queen, but the people come to detest Rosabella, and eventually, Elvira again retains the throne, largely with the help of Roderick, King of Ireland, who ends up marrying her once the law against queens marrying is overturned.

In the end, Father Morris’ crimes are revealed. Throughout the novel, Rosabella has been an orphan, raised by her uncle, the Duke of Cornwall, who is cousin to Queen Claudia and the father of Elvira. A mystery has existed about Rosabella’s father, the duke’s brother, who apparently committed some evil deed and is believed deceased. Rosabella never suspects that Father Morris is actually her father, or that he is working for her preferment to become queen. He is actually living as confessor in his brother’s household and so Rosabella has been with her father since childhood, never knowing it. In the end, it’s revealed that Father Morris had previously been married, but he cheated on his wife with a woman named Marianne. Later, in revenge when he wouldn’t marry her, Marianne took their child and sold it to a Swiss nobleman, claiming it was orphaned—then she switched the child’s place with her own child by a servant and let Father Morris think it was his child. Consequently, the evil Rosabella is really not Father Morris’s child, although he believes she is, and more importantly, she is not royal at all.

What makes Father Morris’s crimes significant in terms of the novel’s Gothic elements is that he is a monk, although he committed his sexual sin not while a man of the cloth but while married. Here, one can’t help thinking of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, who is tempted by Satan in the form of a woman. Father Morris also makes a compact with Cheops, which is rather like the Faustian pact made by so many other Gothic characters, including Lewis’ Monk and characters in later novels like those by George W. M. Reynolds.

But what of the Mummy? In the end, Father Morris accuses him of causing all the problems that led to Rosabella’s overthrow, but the Mummy reveals that he did not cause the problems; he may have put ideas into their heads to commit crimes, but they are the ones who carried them out, spurred on by their ambition and passions. In truth, the Mummy does not seem to have any real supernatural powers other than to be alive when he should be dead. He also appears human, dressed normally and not wearing mummy bandages, once he gets settled in England. He does seem to have a knack for appearing wherever he wants whenever he wants, though how he can do this is never explained. But beyond that, he does not have magic powers of any sort.

Everything ultimately comes to a happy end for all the good characters while the evil characters are punished. When everything is over and done with, the Mummy seems to disappear. Edric is left wondering where Cheops has gone until he hears a voice tell him to return to the pyramid, which he does. When Edric enters the pyramid, he finds Cheops standing there, once again in his mummy wrappings. Cheops tells Edric that if he wants forbidden knowledge, he will give it to him, but it will only bring him misery, so it would be better if he did not pry into forbidden knowledge again. Here is the primary lesson in all Gothic fiction—people must not seek forbidden knowledge or seek power that should only belong to God. It is the same transgression Adam and Eve committed in eating the forbidden fruit. Edric says he has learned his lesson now, but he asks Cheops to tell him his own story. Cheops then reveals that during his lifetime, he committed sin by loving his own sister, and when his father opposed their love, he murdered his father. Of course, murder is a terrible sin, but the Gothic typically also frowns on incest, so I assume that is also why Cheops is cursed, although Egyptian royalty frequently allowed marriages between siblings. (I’m not sure whether Loudon was aware of that since studies of ancient Egypt and the pyramids were in their infancy when Loudon wrote her novel.) Cheops then says that he has used his power to assist the good and punish the malevolent, even though at times it seemed like he was just being evil and causing trouble.

It is now time for Cheops to return to death. As his body begins to stiffen, Edric asks him one last question: Was it really he who brought Cheops to life? Cheops replies that only he who first gave him life could bring him back to life. In other words, God brought him to life and God used him as his instrument throughout the novel. We are then to assume perhaps that Cheops has in some way worked out his redemption through being allowed to return to life—and we can’t help but think of the Christ parallel here—that Christ rose from the tomb through the power of God.

In the end, The Mummy! is a remarkable novel in many ways for how it allows us to assume its primary Gothic horror, Cheops, is a villain, when he turns out to be the instrument of God. Cheops is also a quintessential Gothic wanderer—he is supernatural, he has sinned, he seeks redemption, he has a powerful gaze, he has a story to tell. The novel is innovative for using Gothic themes but placing its horrors in the future rather than the past. It also notably is lacking in Gothic atmosphere other than the tomb scenes and the occasional moments of horror when Cheops appears. (And frankly, Cheops only makes cameo appearances throughout. The edition I read was 386 pages. Cheops is not brought to life until about page 100. He then disappears from about pages 200-286 before he reenters the scene so he really is only focused upon in less than half the novel.) One can’t help feel The Mummy! is an anti-Catholic novel like so many Gothic novels since Father Morris turns out to be the true villain, but there is also a Father Murphy who is a good character. We have an Irish King who is the greatest hero in the novel, whereas most Irish were treated in a derogatory way in English novels to this point, especially because they were predominantly Catholic.

The novel has received almost no critical attention. I have spent twenty years reading and studying Gothic fiction and yet I only learned of the novel’s existence in the last year. It is time for it to be studied more. One wishes to know more about Loudon’s life and inspiration in writing it, including whether she might have revised the novel after reading The Last Man before it was published even though she claimed to have written it previously, and what, if any, political and religious commentary she was offering upon her own 1820s England. (Did she foresee a Catholic England eventually resulting if Catholic Emancipation occurred, which did happen in 1829?) Certainly, Mary Shelley is remarkable for having written Frankenstein at eighteen, but then how much more remarkable, in my opinion, is Loudon for having written The Mummy! at seventeen, which is also stylistically superior to either of Shelley’s novels. Today, Loudon and her husband (she married Loudon after the Mummy was published and he wrote a favorable review of it) are known as preeminent horticulturalists of Victorian England, and they were even part of Charles Dickens’ circle, but certainly, Jane Webb Loudon and The Mummy! deserves far more critical attention.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, a study of nineteenth-century British Gothic literature from 1794 (The Mysteries of Udolpho) to 1897 (Dracula) with a look at twenty and twenty-first century texts like Tarzan of the Apes, Anne Rice’s vampire novels, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Tyler has also written Haunted Marquette, a history of hauntings in his native city of Marquette, Michigan, Spirit of the North: A Paranormal Romance, and the historical fantasy series The Children of Arthur, which details the story of King Arthur and his descendants, beginning with Arthur’s Legacy and including Lilith’s Love, which is largely a sequel to Dracula. You can learn more about Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

Charlotte Gordon’s new biography, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley provides a fascinating look into the lives of these two remarkable, though often misunderstood and maligned, women who were groundbreaking writers of the Romantic and ultimately the Feminist movements. The book is newly published this year by Random House, and while much of what it contains is the same biographical information provided in other books, Gordon has provided much more powerful connections between this mother and daughter by discussing them both in the same book.

“Romantic Outlaws,” a new biography, uses alternating chapters to explore the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley and the mother’s influence on her daughter.

I decided to read this book because while I have studied and written about Mary Shelley, most notably her novels Frankenstein and The Last Man, and also about her father William Godwin’s novel St. Leon, in my own book The Gothic Wanderer. I have also read Shelley’s other novels—Valperga, Mathilde, Lodore, and Perkin Warbeck (I have yet to read Falkland)—and I wanted a better sense of how her life influenced those novels, especially after finding some comments about how her husband Percy Shelley influenced her depiction of Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the throne, believed to have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the tower. I knew a lot about Mary Shelley’s biography but I had never sat down and read a full biography all the way through, and I wanted more insight into her life especially after the well-known years she was married to Percy Shelley, since the bulk of her writing occurred after his death.

So I intended to buy a biography of Mary Shelley, but then I stumbled on this book which also discussed her mother, whom I felt I really didn’t know much about. I knew Wollstonecraft had written some famous treatises and a couple of novels and of her affairs with Gilbert Imlay and Fuseli, but I was intrigued by the idea that she had a huge influence, despite being dead, on Mary Shelley’s life, and I thought it would be interesting to understand that influence better.

Romantic Outlaws is divided into alternating chapters about Wollstonecraft’s life and then Mary Shelley’s life. To some extent, Gordon has done this to tie together similarities and influences from mother to daughter, and that is apparent in a few places, but in others, less so. I have mixed feelings about this structure. Some other reviewers have complained that they had just get interested in one woman when the story flipped to the other woman. That is true, and at times, I got so caught up reading about Mary Shelley that when the chapter changed to be about Mary Wollstonecraft, I momentarily was confused which “Mary” was being referred to, but I quickly realized my mistake. It is possible the book would feel more organized if the book were divided in half, as two books in one, the first about Wollstonecraft, the second about Mary Shelley, but perhaps readers would ignore half then and only read the other half. Gordon made a decision to organize the book in this way, and despite its faults, it does have some advantages and did help to make the influence of Wollstonecraft on her daughter, as well as on Mary’s stepsister and half-sister and Percy Shelley, much more clear. I don’t think I would have ended up understanding Mary Shelley as well without having read so extensively about Wollstonecraft, and I think Gordon really showed that influence in a more complete way than any of the other books I have previously read about Mary Shelley.

I did learn a lot more about Mary Shelley than I knew in terms of her relationships, but I also was disappointed in the later chapters about her. Once Percy Shelley drowns, Gordon quickly wraps up the last half of Shelley’s life in a few chapters, which I wish had been spread out more. For example, she makes one passing reference to Mary Shelley’s friendship with the Carlyles, but I would have liked to know more about that friendship. I was also hoping to learn a little about her friendship with Frances Trollope, mother to the novelist Anthony Trollope and a novelist in her own write, but Frances Trollope is not even mentioned. Perkin Warbeck is only mentioned in passing. There is a little analysis of the other novels, but not what they warrant, especially in the case of The Last Man, which is arguably, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, although I do appreciate that Gordon refers to it as the single voice of protest against war and manifest destiny in this time period. I suspect part of why these later years are brushed over is because Wollstonecraft’s life did not provide enough detail to provide more alternating chapters to juxtapose with Shelley’s, or maybe Shelley’s life was simply not as fascinating once her husband died, and Gordon was more interested in events than literary analysis. In any case, I was disappointed that I did not get out of this book what I initially wanted.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a novelist with a revolutionary pen who fought for the rights of women and left a tremendous legacy that would ultimately fuel the modern feminist movement.

That said, I got a lot that I did not expect in regards to Mary Shelley. I especially appreciated the discussions of Frankenstein and its composition. Gordon makes clear that while Percy Shelley did do some editing of Frankenstein, it is less than the editing done to many famous books, such as The Great Gatsby, and furthermore, the 1831 edition of Frankenstein was heavily rewritten by Mary Shelley, years after Percy Shelley’s death, and made to be much darker in tone. Charges that Percy Shelley was the genius behind Frankenstein have hopefully now finally been laid to rest. I have always thought it ridiculous he should get so much credit anyway since his own novels, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, while written before he was twenty, are far inferior to Mary Shelley’s first novel, which she wrote at about the same age. Percy Shelley was no great fiction writer and even his poetry I have usually found tedious with a few exceptions. Furthermore, as Gordon makes clear, Mary grew up in a very literary home and would have inherited her parents’ talent and have developed writing skills early from all the reading she did and her father’s influence. She knew her mother’s writings well and this no doubt developed her literary skills. I suspect had Percy Shelley never entered the picture, she would have been a writer regardless given her family background, and while Gordon doesn’t mention it, Mary’s half-brother, William Godwin, Jr. (another person I wish Gordon had spent more time on) wrote a novel also. They were a literary family, regardless of Percy Shelley being involved with them.

But the most valuable part of this book is the treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft. I grew to have so much respect for her. Yes, perhaps she acted like a stalker in her pursuit of Fuseli, but she also was a true revolutionary, trying to create a new world for women. Whatever faults she had I think we can dismiss as being the result of the confines of her time and the strain she experienced in going against the grain of her society. As Gordon says in the book’s conclusion of both women, “They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end.” I will not go into details here about how they did this, but will instead encourage people to read the book.

Finally, what I found fascinating about Gordon’s book was her treatment of how literary legacies are fought over. She discusses Godwin’s biography of Wollstonecraft, his desire to publish a biography before anyone else, and the harm it did to his wife’s reputation, despite his intending otherwise. Gordon also makes passing reference to how women who might be inspired by Wollstonecraft’s ideas were treated in the literature of the time, notably Harriet Freake in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Elinor Joddrel in Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). That said, both of those characters, while meeting bad ends, have been read by modern literary scholars less as a condemnation of Wollstonecraft’s ideals and more as a subversive statement of how women were treated—a point Gordon overlooks. I wish again that more literary analysis had been included in this case, especially since The Wanderer is a feminist masterpiece in my opinion, as I discuss in more detail in my book The Gothic Wanderer, and I would have liked more comparison between Wollstonecraft and Burney, who was arguably the greatest female novelist of the late eighteenth century and very much a woman who used her novels to champion women, even if in more subtle ways—yet, while Gordon never directly says so, when she cites the female novels of the day that Wollstonecraft disapproved of, it often sounded like she was referring to plots found in Burney’s novels.

Mary Shelley also had to fight to preserve her husband’s literary legacy, and in many ways, she chose to whitewash it to remove the scandal and atheism Percy Shelley was known for. Similarly, Gordon explores how Mary Shelley’s own literary legacy has changed over the years. Ultimately, both of her subjects were rediscovered in the 1970s and today have been given their place in the canon of British literature, a place well-deserved.

Mary Shelley, too often in her husband’s shadow, was devoted to preserving and cultivating the Romantic legacy. Today, she is acknowledged as one of the greatest Romantic writers.

Personally, I found Romantic Outlaws to be a valuable and eye-opening book. It adds to and expands on the conversation about these two fascinating women, and it leaves room for further exploration. I will definitely be reading Wollstonecraft’s novels now, and Romantic Outlaws also made me want to read more of Godwin’s work. In truth, I found the book hard to put down, and while I wish it had even more information about these women, at 547 pages of primary text, it is a good length and reads with excellent pacing. Both informative and entertaining, Romantic Outlaws is literary biography made to read almost like a novel (in a few places early in the book I felt like Gordon bordered on fiction in presenting viewpoints of the subjects in the book, something she’s been charged with in her biography Mistress Bradstreet). My criticisms of this book are minor really when placed aside the tremendous amount of research and the vivacity of the presentation throughout that Gordon has accomplished. I was won over by Gordon’s style, and since I am a fan of Anne Bradstreet (and relative), I will be interested in reading that Gordon biography in the near future. Most importantly, Gordon has achieved what she set out to accomplish—to convince her readers of the powerful voices these two women had and to help us better understand them and their time.

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Tyler Tichelaar, Ph.D., is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, and The Children of Arthur novel series. Visit Tyler at www.ChildrenofArthur.com and www.GothicWanderer.com

The story has been told countless times of how a party composed of Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont met at Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 and there amused themselves by, among other things, reading ghost stories. When Lord Byron proposed that they each write a ghost story, the results were Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, two of the most important works of Gothic literature.

An integral part of this story that usually receives little mention is that the book of ghost stories they read was Fantasmagoriana, in its French edition, which was later translated into English as Tales of the Dead. Sometimes sources list one or other title as the book read. The confusion about the book’s title results from its publication history. Although this book had an influence on the group of famous writers, not a lot of attention has been given to it, which made me curious to read it and see what, if any, merits it might contain. I was pleasantly surprised by its quality.

Lord Byron – He first suggested, based on reading “Tales of the Dead” that the party at Lake Geneva each right a ghost story. Byron’s own story was never completed, but Polidori’s story was at first erroneously attributed to him.

First, a little about its publication history to clarify some of the confusion about the title. Although it is often said that Shelley and company read a volume of German ghost stories, without stating the title, the compiler of the book, Sarah Elizabeth Utterson, actually translated the majority of the stories in Tales of the Dead from the French collection Fantasmagoriana, which in turn was a collection of various translated German works. Utterson left out three of the stories from Fantasmagoriana because they “did not appear equally interesting to her.” She also “considerably curtailed” her translation of the story “L’Amour Muet” (“The Spectre-Barber”) because the love story aspect didn’t suit the story collection in her opinion. To the collection, she added a new story, “The Storm,” which she said she had heard from a friend. She published the book in 1813, three years prior to the famous Lake Geneva meeting of Shelley and friends.

I won’t go into great detail about the differences of the stories and their titles here over the course of the translations. I recommend that people visit the Wikipedia entry on Tales of the Dead for more details. The page is very informative about the publication background, and it looks at this time as if it is intended that it will eventually have full plot summaries for all six of the stories, although only the first story’s plot is currently there, but that summary includes a wonderful family tree of the characters, which readers will find helpful since the relationships are very complicated.

My purpose here is to entice people to read these fabulous stories without giving away the entire plots of them, and to answer the question of whether they are of literary value and did they have any influence on Mary Shelley and Polidori.

I do believe they are of literary value, both for their influence on the Shelley party as well as their being extremely readable without a lot of the flowery language common in the period. In fact, I think they are some of the best ghost stories I’ve ever read, far more so than many of the other short stories of this period as well as some of the better known novels, including some of the Northanger novels mentioned by Austen.

I have read elsewhere that two of the stories, “The Family Portraits” and “The Death-Bride” were the two stories that most influenced the Shelley-Byron party, and I have to agree with this assessment. I found nothing in the other stories, despite their merits, that seemed to reflect anything in Frankenstein or The Vampyre. That said, I was relieved not to find a great deal of influence because that shows just how phenomenal and imaginative were the writers of Frankenstein and The Vampyre.

So what was the influence? In the first story “The Family Portraits,” a group of people gather together to tell ghost stories. That scene no doubt inspired Lord Byron to make his suggestion that the party do the same. In “The Death-Bride” the storyteller is also a gambler, so it’s possible that the gambling influenced Polidori to include the gambling theme in The Vampyre, although gambling occurs in numerous Gothic novels (see my chapter on “Gambling as Gothic Transgression” in my book The Gothic Wanderer) so naming the gambling here as an influence may be a stretch since the gambling in this story is not too prevalent to the tale’s importance and Polidori himself was known to be in debt for gambling at the end of his life. Another interesting point is the piercing look that the storyteller gives one of the listeners, a look reflective of the hypnotic look of the Wandering Jew in literature of this time, notably Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1795); hypnotic eyes will also become a key element of the vampire figure.

Percy Shelley wrote a ghost story in the summer of 1816 that he later published in a travel book, but he had previously written two short Gothic novels “St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian” and “Zastrozzi” while still a teenager.

It’s also interesting to note that although Polidori’s story is considered the first treatment of a vampire in English prose (some poems have vampire type characters in them prior to it including Southey’s “Thalaba the Destroyer” and Coleridge’s “Christabel”), in the “Preface to the French Translation” reference is made to vampires, so such creatures were known to an English audience then even though the author is referencing foreign works that mention them. Still Polidori’s story would set the precedent for what would be the typical vampire character in fiction.

Also of interest is that in the “Introduction,” it’s stated because of the number of imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe’s books, the interest in Gothic stories had already declined. Actually, Gothic novels remained fairly popular until the end of the decade, perhaps partly due to Shelley’s book published in 1818, and the last really notable Gothic novel of this period is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.

As for the stories themselves, I’ll just discuss the premises of them here without giving away the endings because it would be a shame to spoil the fun of reading them for anyone. So in brief, here are what the six Tales of the Dead are about:

The Family Portraits: This story begins with a group of characters telling ghost stories. The main character stumbles upon the group. He is on his way to meet a young lady his mother wishes him to marry, but he has his qualms about doing so. He hears the story of a family portrait that fell and caused a young woman’s death and he tells his own story, both stories being based on people he knew, which leads to him discovering a mystery of complex family relationships and an ancestral ghost. The story reminds me of The Mysteries of Udolpho with its complex family secrets and the discoveries of family relationships unknown to the heroine in that novel. That someone might be killed by a portrait falling on her seems a bit far-fetched, but this story is probably the most complicated in the book and it sets the precedent for family or ancestral ghosts that haunt the characters in several of the stories, a type of haunting that is a common element in Gothic literature.

And the curse is wonderful in this story. Without giving away the storyline, a young man, Ditmar, is cursed by a monk and becomes a true Gothic wanderer figure (one who lives beyond the regular lifespan and is fated to wander the earth in misery, unable to die or have his soul redeemed):

“this Ditmar has been seen wandering abroad dressed in the garb represented in the picture; and by kissing the descendants of the family, has doomed them to death. Three of my children have received this fatal kiss. It is said, a monk imposed on him this penance in expiation of his crimes. But he cannot destroy all the children of his race: for so long as the ruins of the old tower shall remain, and whilst one stone shall remain on another, so long shall the count de Wartbourg’s family exist; and so long shall the spirit of Ditmar wander on the earth, and devote to death the branches of his house, without being able to annihilate the trunk. His race will never be extinct; and his punishment will only cease when the ruins of the tower are entirely dispersed.”

Of course, the curse is finally lifted, but how it comes about is a complex story you will have to read.

Not only was Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, pregnant by Lord Byron in the summer of 1816, but she did not write a ghost story and all her literary attempts during her life were for naught. She finally told a friend, “But in our family, if you cannot write an epic or novel, that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature, not worth acknowledging.”

The Fated Hour: This is one of the strangest stories I have ever read. Florentina is about to be married but believes when she marries she will die. Then she tells her friends about her sister Seraphina, who is now dead, but who while living could at time seem to be in two places at the same time. At one point, she disappeared and came back looking deathlike. She also makes prophecies before she dies that convince the girls’ father that if Florentina ever marries, she will also die. You just know this story isn’t going to turn out well.

The Death’s Head: This tale tells of a young man, Calzolaro, who comes to town with a group of rope dancers to contest his father’s will as well as give a performance in the town. The story treats of ventriloquism and it is planned that Calzolaro will use ventriloquism to make it appear that a skull will speak during the performance. A skull is then brought to him after being dug up from the churchyard, but Calzolaro is not aware of whose skull it is, which leads to a surprising result. It’s enough to say here that again a dead family member is the cause of a haunting.

The Death-Bride: Here, as in “The Family Portraits,” we have a story within a story, the frame being that of the Marquis who likes to gamble. He tells to his friends a story he heard about two twin sisters and how one died. Later the deceased sister is seen in Paris and mistaken for the living sister, but the living sister protests she’s never been to Paris. Once again, a family member is the ghost haunting the family, although the story gets more complicated from that point, and the Marquis also has the purpose in telling his tale of drawing out the guilt of one of his listeners who recognizes the story concerns himself.

The Storm: This story is the only one not originally taken from the Fantasmagoriana. When I began it, I thought it the most-attention grabbing story in the book. It begins when a young man is to be married and his uncle the Chevalier invites all the local nobility, some whom the family scarcely knows. During the reception, the Chevalier’s daughter, Emily, befriends Isabella, a young widow who is new to the neighborhood. Before the party is over, a great storm springs up and the guests are forced to spend the night at the Chevalier’s castle. Isabella refuses to stay but finds she has no choice since her attendants cannot return in the storm to fetch her. Then she wants to be alone, but Emily first tries to get her to share her room and then offers to sit up the night in the sitting room with her. Finally, Isabella tells her it is the six year anniversary of a horrible event and she is doomed to witness it tonight and Emily will now have to witness it also and be doomed as a result. Isabella swears Emily to silence over what she shall see. Emily keeps asking questions about what is to happen but Isabella only keeps saying how they are doomed, and not even religion can save them or penance atone for sins like hers. And then midnight strikes and the door to the room opens…

I won’t give away the ending, but the buildup results in a let-down and I think this added story ends up being the weakest in the collection. Emily ends up fainting when she sees the horror which reminds me of Emily St. Aubert fainting when she sees what is behind the veil in the Castle of Udolpho.

Dr. John Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician. Besides “The Vampyre,” he would later write the Gothic novel “Ernestus Berchtold.”

The Spectre-Barber: This tale is the one with the edited love story, and in truth, the love story is barely there now. A young man, Francis, inherits his wealthy father’s fortune, but he quickly spends it all and goes into debt. He then has to try to make his fortune in the world, inspired by a young woman named Meta with whom he falls in love. The story wanders about a great deal but it has its suspenseful moments such as when Francis is traveling and must seek shelter for the night. A peasant refuses to let him stay at his home but tells him to go to a nearby castle for shelter, but with the warning that the owner always flagellates all he entertains. I couldn’t wait to see the flagellation happen, but I ended up being disappointed.

Later, Francis stays at another castle where the title character shows up. I won’t go into explanations of the spectre, but we do find out he was cursed by a monk (it was a monk in “The Family Portraits” who also gave the curse), which resulted in his becoming a Gothic Wanderer figure. Here is the monk’s curse:

“‘Depraved wretch’ said he, ‘know that at your death, the formidable gates of heaven, of hell, and of purgatory will alike be closed against your sinful soul, which shall wander through this castle, in the form of a ghost, until some man, without being invited or constrained, shall do to you, what you have so long done to others.’”

This story ends up being entertaining but the plotting is not as tight or satisfactory as the earlier stories in the work. I also have to admit I find a ghost who is a barber rather comical.

I hope by now you’re enticed to read Tales of the Dead for yourself. Imagine it being read aloud by Lord Byron or Mary Shelley on a dark and gloomy summer night near Lake Geneva in 1816. Who knows? Perhaps it will inspire you to write the next great Gothic novel.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would be the greatest novel that resulted from the ghost storytelling in the summer of 1816. She would go on to write another six novels.

So where do you find a copy today of this two-hundred-year-old collection? At Amazon, you can buy Fantasmagoriana: Tales of the Dead edited by A.J. Day, but this is not the Tales of the Dead that Shelley and company read. This is Fantasmagoriana, the source for Tales of the Dead, translated into English without the added “The Storm” story and with the three stories that Utterson did not find interesting enough to retain. I don’t believe you can purchase Tales of the Dead anywhere currently, but it is available online at http://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte where you can actually view a copy of the original 1813 edition page-by-page as well as read it online or download it. Enjoy!

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Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. is the author of numerous books including The Gothic Wanderer. For more information, visit him at www.GothicWanderer.com

L. Frank Baum, best known as author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its many sequels, may seem unlikely as a Gothic author, but he was heavily influenced by the Gothic (and fairy tale) traditions, as evidenced by his wicked witches of Oz, among other characters. Baum wanted to create fairy tales that were not scary, although anyone who saw the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a child knows just how scary Margaret Hamilton was as the Wicked Witch of the West. Nevertheless, there is a benevolent sense that all will turn out for the best and good will triumph over evil that pervades the comic world of Oz.

Since I was eight years old, I have been a fan of Baum’s fourteen Oz books and have read almost all the other books as well that he wrote. The Oz books, more than probably any other books, are my constant source of comfort whenever I need escapism and I still go back and reread them over and over. Recently, I reread The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), the twelfth book in the series, and the one I have often thought the least interesting, but this time, after having worked so long on writing my book The Gothic Wanderer, I am more aware of Gothic elements in other works and was surprisingly engrossed by this book’s Gothic themes.

It might be a stretch to say the book is Gothic, but it does introduce a young boy named Woot the Wanderer, more a romantic than Gothic wanderer, but a wanderer nonetheless. There is also a giant Yookoohoo (an enchantress who does transformations), Mrs. Yoop, who turns Woot, The Tin Woodman, and their companions into various animals, and there is the Lonesome Duck, quite the melancholy and isolated Gothic character. But most Gothic of all is Chopfyt, Baum’s own version of the Frankenstein Monster.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Tin Woodman recounts how he was in love with Nimmie Amee, but the Wicked Witch of the East disapproved of the relationship and enchanted his ax so that he cut off his various body parts. He took these to Ku-Klip, the tinsmith, who then kept the arm or leg, etc. and made the Tin Woodman a new one out of tin until eventually he was completely made of tin. At the beginning of The Tin Woodman of Oz, the Tin Woodman decides he will find Nimmie Amee and ask her to marry him after all these years.

After many adventures, the Tin Woodman and his friends meet the Tin Soldier, who had fallen in love with Nimmie Amee after the Tin Woodman. He had a similar experience and ended up made completely of tin as well. Together, these two tin men and their companions arrive at the tinsmith’s shop to inquire whether Ku-Klip knows where Nimmie Amee now lives. Seeing that Ku-Klip is not home, they look about the shop, and before long, they find their arms and legs in pickled water, and horror of horrors, the Tin Woodman finds his own head staring back at him and it talks. Because it is separated from the rest of its body, including its heart, the head is not overly intelligent or polite. Nevertheless, no one can die in Oz, so a talking head sits on a shelf in the tinsmith’s shop, alive for all time.

It is a shocking moment in the novel, and quite an uncomfortable and disturbing one, but not as disturbing as what comes next. Ku-Klip returns, and when asked what he did with the Tin Soldier’s head, he confesses that he took the best pieces of both tin men’s original bodies and created from them Chopfyt, whose name is a compilation of the Tin Woodman’s real name Nick Chopper and the Tin Soldier’s name Captain Fyter.

The tinsmith now tells them where Nimmie Amee lives so the two tin men go to find her, agreeing they will abide by her decision which of them she’ll have. But horror of horrors, they find she is now married to Chopfyt, who resembles the two of them and even has a tin arm of his own.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most terrifying moments is when the Monster demands that Victor Frankenstein create a female mate for him. At first, Victor begins to create such a female monster, but then he realizes these monsters could ultimately breed a race of monsters who will conquer the human race, so he destroys the female monster before it is brought to life. In revenge, the Monster kills Victor’s bride, Elizabeth, on their wedding night. Baum reverses this scene, not having the Monster kill the bride, but instead marry her, and she even prefers the Monster.

The creation of Chopfyt – an illustration by John R. Neill for The Tin Woodman of Oz

Both the Tin Soldier and the Tin Woodman offer themselves to Nimee Amee, but she tells them she will keep Chopfyt rather than having to scold and chide a new husband into knowing her ways, and while Chopfyt is not “agreeable”—Woot later says he’s a total “grouch”—she will stick with her monster man.

If readers feel my comparisons between Baum’s Oz character, Chopfyt, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster are a stretch, I should point out that Baum also created the Patchwork Girl of Oz, a woman without human anatomy in her creation, but one who inspired Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, which is based on both The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

I do not know whether L. Frank Baum ever read Frankenstein, and the novel was not as popular during his lifetime as it was later in the twentieth century when it became part of popular culture because of its film versions, but doubtless, he was an innovative author able to capitalize on terrifying themes and turn them into benign and comical, if still, disturbing Gothic moments, in his novels. Like Shelley’s, Baum’s imagination knew few boundaries.

As has been told thousands of times, Frankenstein was first conceived during a holiday in 1816 when Lord Byron, his physician John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley all gathered together to tell ghost stories. From that evening Polidori’s The Vampyre was conceived—the first vampire story in English—and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Consequently, Byron was present at the origins of Frankenstein.

What I wouldn’t give to have Byron’s copy of Frankenstein, but alas, I don’t have 400,000 pounds. But the auction sale reminded me of one of my favorite literary experiences I had in the summer of 2000 when I attended the first Edward Bulwer-Lytton conference at the University of London in England. There I presented a paper about the influences of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Zanoni (1842) on Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a paper that later formed the basis for a chapter in my new book The Gothic Wanderer. But for me, the highlight of the conference was when Lord Cobbold, descendant of Bulwer-Lytton, had us all for dinner and a play at Knebworth House, the fabulous Victorian Gothic home built by Bulwer-Lytton.

Knebworth House and Gardens

Bulwer-Lytton fancied himself as a Lord Byron type, having come of age while Byron’s poetry was all the rage. Bulwer-Lytton was born in 1803 while Lord Byron died in 1824. Not far from Knebworth House was the home of Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron’s former mistress, who had committed adultery with him, despite her marriage to Viscount Melbourne, later Prime Minister of England. By the time Bulwer-Lytton knew Lamb, she was middle-aged, but he was a young man who fancied she might take an interest in him, although eighteen years his senior.

As far as we know, his attraction to her—perhaps more from her former relationship with Lord Byron than her own beauty—never amounted to anything, but because of his interests in Lord Byron, she gave him Lord Byron’s ruler which she had in her possession as well as a copy of Glenarvon, a fabulous Gothic novel she wrote in 1816, a thinly disguised portrait of her relationship with Lord Byron, in which she depicts him as having similarities to a vampire. The main character, Callantha, commits adultery with the title character Glenarvon, a relationship that is akin to achieving damnation, but in the end, they separate and Callantha finds redemption while Glenarvon is tormented at sea, seeing the Flying Dutchman, the haunted ship manned by sailors who can never rest and which would later be developed more fully in Captain Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship (1839). While Glenarvon is not the best written novel, it’s a fascinating one, full of Gothic elements, and interesting as a portrait of Lord Byron. Byron was himself not impressed by the book, remarking upon it, “I read Glenarvon too by Caro Lamb….God damn!”

You can well imagine how exciting it was for me to visit Knebworth House and especially when Lord Cobbold gave us a tour, showed us Lord Byron’s ruler, and then unlocked the glass cabinet, and unbelievably, passed around the copy of Glenarvonthat Lady Caroline Lamb had given to Edward Bulwer-Lytton! For just a moment, I got to hold it in my hands and feel connected to those far away great Gothic authors of the past. Now if I only had 400,000 pounds.

Gargoyles on one of Knebworth House’s many towers.

For more information on Gothic literature, Lamb, Bulwer-Lytton, Shelley, and Byron, check out my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Fiction 1794-present available at www.GothicWanderer.com. and if you’d like to visit Knebworth House, well worth the visit, and a house that has been featured in many films, you can learn more at: http://www.knebworthhouse.com/

If you’re curious about my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Fiction from 1794-Present, here is the introduction to the book, giving insight not only into what the book is about but also why the Gothic is so popular and why it matters today.

Introduction

Our Long Love Affair with the Gothic

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

I love the Gothic. Most of us do, even if we don’t know exactly what the term “Gothic” means. It may mean different things to all of us, yet those things are closely related. Some of us might think of the Goth look where teenagers wear all black. Others might think of Gothic cathedrals. And a smaller percentage of us might think about classic Gothic literature—the great eighteenth and nineteenth century novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and several others.

We love the Gothic partly because we have a fascination with being scared. I love to be scared—I don’t go for the gory horror films of today, but I love suspense and the greatest Gothic literature builds up such suspense. But more importantly, Gothic literature reveals much about who we are, what we fear, and to what we aspire.

I was always fascinated with the Gothic—commonly called horror, or simply, when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, what was “scary.” I didn’t know the term Gothic and wouldn’t know it until well into high school, but I knew the Munsters, the Addams Family, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Broom-Hilda the Witch, and countless other characters in popular culture from that time who were often watered down children’s versions of the Gothic.

I remember the “Creature Feature” film being shown Saturday afternoons on TV50 from Detroit, and I loved Love at First Bite (1979) starring George Hamilton as Dracula—when it was broadcast on TV for the first time, my brother and I had a big fight over the TV (we only had one in the house in those days) because it was aired opposite Yogi’s First Christmas, which he wanted to watch.

I was the proud owner of the Weebles Haunted House complete with Weebles that “wobble but they don’t fall down”—including the witch with a removable pointy hat, a glow-in-the dark ghost, two Weeble children to be scared, secret panels, trapped doors, and a treasure chest with bats inside. All of it scary but wonderful!

In fourth grade, I was Dracula for Halloween—I remember still the thrill of running so my cape would flap in the wind, and I can still taste the plastic vampire teeth. Nor did I ever miss going through a Haunted House at the fair, and my friends and I commonly played haunted house, turning our bedrooms or the family room into a mansion of monsters and ghosts. Again, I was always Dracula.

And perhaps best of all, I owned the wonderfully dramatic record The Story of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein from Power Records. This fabulous 33 1/3 record came with a read along book in graphic novel form (we called them comic books back then) and it combined into one dramatic tale the stories of its title characters. I played this record over and over again and still have my copy today. I constantly quoted it to others, including the pivotal scene when the werewolf (oddly not the Wolfman but Vincent von Frankenstein’s girlfriend Erika—Wolfwoman, I guess) attacks the Count, causing him to become enraged and reveal himself by declaring, “You dare!! You dare lay your paws on me! On me?! Low beast, you’ll die for this, die at the hands of the Prince of Darkness…FOR I AM DRACULA!” Recently, when I was working on this introduction, I dug out the record to engage in nostalgia and left it on my coffee table. My brother came over to visit and saw the record there and rolled his eyes. When I asked whether he wanted to listen to it, he said, “No, I never want to have to listen to that record again.” Apparently, I played it one—or maybe fifty—too many times.

But all these details could be dismissed as children’s games and just good fun (despite the fanatics who would ban The Wizard of Oz, or more recently, the Harry Potter books and films because they contain depictions of witchcraft). Only, I think on some innocent level that I could not have articulated when I was ten years old, I was even then searching for meaning—to understand the mystery of life, even if it were only the simplified notion of good and evil. I was a very religious child who had read the entire Bible by fifth grade, loved to play at being various characters from the Bible—mostly Moses or Jacob—and wanted to grow up to be a priest. So if I were such a “religious nut”—as one friend called me—how do I explain my fascination with horror and the supernatural?

And how explain my curiosity over an activity that countless children have attempted over the years? Yes, I am one of those many children who locked himself in the bathroom in the dark, stared into the bathroom mirror, and then tried to find out whether it was true that if I could say, “Bloody Murder!” one hundred times without blinking, the devil would appear in the mirror. But I was never able not to blink before I could say it one hundred times, or I would inevitably lose count.

Still, the quest for forbidden knowledge was strong in me at an early age. The fascination with Good and Evil thrilled me like it does many children, but I wanted proof that the supernatural forces of Good and Evil truly existed. Years later, when I discovered Percy Shelley’s lines quoted above, I was stunned by how perfectly he captured what I felt, his experiences matching mine of nearly two centuries later. And like Shelley, I eventually grew to love Intellectual Beauty.

As I reached my teen years, I discovered literature, having always loved to read, and soon novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen became my primary fascination. It would be Jane Austen who really converted me into being a disciple of the Gothic. When I was about sixteen, I listened to an audio book version of Northanger Abbey with an introduction that explained the novel’s purpose as a satire of the Gothic novels, particularly of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Of course, I had to read Mrs. Radcliffe. Her novel had to be special ordered from the bookstore and although it was well over 600 pages, I devoured it in a week, reading it every free minute before and after school. The prose was beautiful, the suspense fabulous, the Gothic world frighteningly fascinating. I went on to read the rest of Radcliffe’s novels while I was still a teenager as well as reading other Gothic classics like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein (1818) followed, and in college when I discovered the Romantic poets, I could put all these books into context.

What was it about these books that thrilled me so much? Why did The Mysteries of Udolpho seem like such a wonderfully pleasant book to read, as well as a suspenseful page-turner? What about Dracula made me afraid to go to sleep, yet want to read it again—and enjoy the original novel so much more than the film versions of it—save for Coppola’s fabulous Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)? I don’t know that I asked myself that question until the late 1990s when my fascination with literature and my desire to be a novelist led me to being a Ph.D. candidate in the literature program at Western Michigan University. The result would be my writing a dissertation titled The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, which has now been expanded into this book. And I wasn’t the only enthusiastic student of the Gothic—at least two of my fellow doctoral candidates at the time also wrote about the Gothic in their dissertations.

Of all the subjects a person could write a dissertation on, why did I choose nineteenth century Gothic novels? I also loved Dickens, the Arthurian legend, Anthony Trollope, eighteenth century epistolary novels—why choose the Gothic over one of these topics? The reason was because I could relate to the Gothic; it resonated with me in ways those other great literary works did not at that time in my life. And I wanted to write about why it resonated with me, why I thought the Gothic mattered so much to people—I wanted to write what was called a “reader-response” dissertation, but I was dissuaded from it by my professors—told it would not be good for my academic career.

Now that I have long since left academia behind, I can straightforwardly say that academics too often forget that while they are the keepers of the culture, in order to pass that culture on, they have to show people why that culture matters—how it still relates to them. While at Western Michigan University, I had the opportunity to co-teach a class on the British Survey of Literature with Dr. Stephanie Gauper. During that class, she commented to me about my teaching, “The students like you because you make them understand how the literature is relevant to their lives. Most teachers don’t do that.” I always felt that was one of the greatest compliments I ever received. And while, in my dissertation, I made the mistake not to explain why the Gothic mattered and was still relevant to our lives, in this book, written for a wider audience, I wish to remedy that by stating that the Gothic is very relevant to our lives, that it speaks to us today, two hundred years after the great Gothic novels were written because what the people in the decades following the French Revolution and during the Victorian period dreamt, feared, longed for, and sought, is still what we dream, fear, long for, and seek today. The Gothic is perhaps the most relevant piece of literature for the twenty-first century, and its continuation in the novels of Stephen King and Anne Rice, the popular books and films of the Twilight series, and the countless vampire books, films, and television series being produced each year, testify to this fact.

But how does it speak to us? Why is it still relevant to us? Let me give one more example from my own history to make my point.

In the fall of 1995, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the same state as my hometown of Marquette, but nearly five hundred miles from home—in fact on a different peninsula—I might as well have been in another state, in some ways, in another country. I had culture shock in Kalamazoo—it was the big city compared to what I was used to—I didn’t know the people, the city streets, the weather, the mindset of those people. I was isolated, lonely, and downright miserable in Kalamazoo, wondering why I had ever made the decision to leave my hometown, but realizing the job market in Upper Michigan offered nothing for me, so I would have to go on to finish my degree, to become an English professor, and to take a job wherever one might exist—meaning I would never get to return home. I felt even more depressed and despairing when I looked at the future. If not for good friends and family and a telephone to talk to them on, I never would have gotten through those years. I would have defined these feelings as homesickness if I had not discovered a better word for it. That word I learned that first semester at Western Michigan University while taking a course on the Brontë sisters.

I decided in that class to write my final paper on the theme of colonialism in the Brontës’ novels. In my research, I came across the term “displacement” to describe the African character in one of the Brontës’ juvenilia. Instantly, I understood that word as perfectly describing my own feelings and experience. I was displaced. I was convinced that while I loved teaching and studying literature, I would never get to go home—I felt depressed when not terrorized by the thought. The job market in academia was such that it was unlikely I would ever find a tenure-track job at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. I foresaw myself moving from one university to another, always separated from my family and friends.

I stuck it out to finish my Ph.D. but my feelings of displacement did not get better. The job market—academia itself—was largely a nightmare—the MLA convention like a massive haunted house of pale young men in black suits, looking like blood-drained humans, fearful of interviewers yet hoping to be hired for tenure-track jobs. When I did find a job, it was a lowly one-year instructor position at Clemson University where I was given the equally “blood-draining” task of teaching up to 107 students per semester in a variety of composition and British literature survey courses (one literature and three composition sections). I had, consequently, upwards of five hundred papers per semester to grade and was paid $24,000 a year. And I had to do it in a hellishly hot climate I hated, while again feeling displaced. I have no doubt many people love Kalamazoo and South Carolina and I do not wish to disparage those places—my point is that I was unhappy and felt like a Gothic wanderer in them. Equally, we are all shaped by our individual preferences, likes and dislikes, and we all have different levels of tolerance. Here in Marquette, Michigan, I’m sure many people find our long winters and 200+ inches of snow per winter equally hellish, as roads between six foot snowbanks become like Gothic labyrinths, and bone-chilling temperatures seem like undeserving torture. Any place can be interpreted as “Gothic” if we so choose because Hell is in the mind—and the Gothic is nothing if not an exploration of human psychology and what we fear, as well as how we choose to let guilt and fear color our perspectives—one man’s transgression may be another man’s freedom.

And while my personal example may not seem nightmarish to most, it was like torture to me at the time, and it was in the midst of that nightmare that I began my doctoral dissertation. I chose to write about the Gothic wanderer because I felt myself to be like a Gothic wanderer, displaced and wandering through the mysterious maze of academia and the academic job market. In the chapters that follow, while I will discuss the Gothic novels themselves without commentary on how their themes relate to our lives today—something I don’t doubt my readers can figure out for themselves, let me here briefly list a few examples of how these Gothic wanderer figures speak to who we—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, from all races and religions—are today, and who we have always been.

The Gothic’s popularity arose at the time of the French Revolution as people questioned the legitimacy of their government—the monarchy—as well as the governments that replaced it, and the entire social order and its institutions, especially organized religion. Paranoia and conspiracy theories were common—our political concerns have not changed much today and continue to be reflected in our fiction. Just as the early Gothic novels theorized that certain secret societies were manipulating the French Revolution, today, we are no less fascinated by conspiracy theories—whether it be Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code with its alleged revelation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of the lost bloodline of Christ’s children via Mary Magdalene (the Gothic has always loved to pick on the Catholic Church), or beliefs that the government is withholding information from us about everything from terrorists to UFOs. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Government has even been accused by some of staging the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq.

Concerns about the patriarchal system, legitimate children, and the sanctity of the family were common in early Gothic novels—how much more today when divorce is prevalent and children are frequently born outside of marriage, mothers take men to court and have DNA paternity tests given to verify who a child’s father may be, while in politics we hear about the need to return to “family values.”

The Wandering Jew is one of the key figures in the Gothic, and although we may not be cursed to wander like him, our jobs and the economy often force us to move to unfamiliar places, to find employment in sectors we feel uncomfortable with, to experience displacement. At the same time, the Wandering Jew is a metaphor for the plight of the Jewish people. The effects of the Holocaust—a horror the nineteenth century Gothic novelists never could have imagined—still haunt us, and the Jewish people still struggle with prejudice and violence directed against them, even after having a homeland established in Israel.

The Rosicrucian Gothic wanderer is obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. Are we any less obsessed with it today when we value youthfulness, and when studies predict that half of Americans born in the late twentieth century will live to see age one hundred? The Gothic fascination with life-extension continues for us today.

The Gothic concern with gambling is no less relevant today. Gambling in Gothic literature is viewed as a transgression, a way to achieve wealth to advance oneself in society, and consequently, it usually results in destruction for the gambler and his family. Today, gambling is an even bigger problem than it was two centuries ago. We constantly hear tales of lottery winners who waste their millions, only to become bankrupts. We know of people who invest in the stock market, or worse, get taken advantage of in Ponzi schemes, only to lose everything. We continually worry about the economy, and most of us continue to have financial difficulties or an unhealthy relationship with money, while longing for wealth that we falsely believe will solve all our problems.

Working conditions became a Gothic concern with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. In Dickens’ day, horrendous working conditions were being fought against. In the early twentieth century, the rise of unions helped to solve many of those problems, establishing an eight-hour work day and the weekend. But how many of us today find ourselves working long hours? What industry did to the Victorians, modern technology has done to us, making us connected 24/7 and perhaps improving communication but also resulting in expectations to work constantly.

Perhaps no novelist in all of literature has been more visionary or speaks more to our time than the Gothic novelist Mary Shelley. The issues in Frankenstein are the very issues of stem cell research, cloning, and the other quandaries of science we continue to argue over today. The need for responsible science is now more important than ever. In The Last Man, Shelley introduced the fear of a worldwide plague which today remains a terrifying possibility. Shelley’s vision of the future is frighteningly accurate in many ways. In recent decades, the scare of AIDS and the bird and swine flu have made people fear worldwide human extinction as a possibility. The possibility of nuclear war and biological warfare has made it possible that man could someday be responsible for his own extinction, unintentionally, or intentionally. The recent film Contagion (2011) is just one of many works that speak to these fears.

In the Victorian period, a religious crisis arose with the introduction of theories of evolution. Organized religion began slowly to lose its hold over people. Those shifts have only continued to the present day. The understanding that we are spiritual beings having a human experience has become a mantra in recent decades. More and more people have quit subscribing to organized religion but come to describe themselves as spiritual, and this desire to connect with our spiritual (supernatural) selves has led many down less traditional Western paths, including to eastern religions, beliefs in reincarnation, listening to entities who channel their messages through humans, an emphasis upon “the Goddess,” and the creation of new religions such as scientology. In many cases, a general move away from institutional Christianity has not led to atheism but what might be termed a spiritual reawakening that allows humanity, if not the autonomy from God that Milton’s Satan sought, then at least the “faith, hope, and self-esteem” that Percy Shelley dreamt of for humanity.

The vampire is the nineteenth century Gothic wanderer figure who has remained most popular in the twenty-first century and continues to be reinvented. Despite his “evil” nature, he has become glamorous and attractive; the lines between good and evil have been blurred; we now have dark heroes and sympathetic villains. The continuing popularity of the vampire two centuries after he was first introduced to English readers speaks to how much the Gothic still influences our lives today.

While the bulk of this study will cover nineteenth century British Gothic fiction, I will offer in the epilogue some insight into how the themes of that period’s Gothic literature have continued and been transformed in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, some still noticeably Gothic, such as Stephenie Myer’s Twilight series and Anne Rice’s vampire novels, while other influences are hard-pressed to be termed “Gothic” but still have Gothic elements or owe a debt to the Gothic, including such popular figures as Tarzan and Batman.

The Gothic wanderer is still with us today; he has lost a lot of his angst over the centuries, but the figure still fascinates us. This study will hopefully help to explain a little of why we love the Gothic—because we discover in the Gothic wanderer our very selves.

Welcome to my new blog, The Gothic Wanderer, created in conjunction with the upcoming publication of my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Literature from 1794-present.

The book will be released this fall. In the meantime, I’ll be blogging about all things Gothic, including classic Gothic literature, Gothic films, and how the Gothic continues to permeate our daily lives.

But for now, here’s a little about the book.

The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption by Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D.

The Gothic Wanderer Rises Eternal in Popular Literature

From the horrors of sixteenth century Italian castles to twenty-first century plagues, from the French Revolution to the liberation of Libya, Tyler R. Tichelaar takes readers on far more than a journey through literary history. The Gothic Wanderer is an exploration of man’s deepest fears, his efforts to rise above them for the last two centuries, and how he may be on the brink finally of succeeding.

Tichelaar examines the figure of the Gothic wanderer in such well-known Gothic novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, and Dracula, as well as lesser known works like Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni. He also finds surprising Gothic elements in classics like Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. From Matthew Lewis’ The Monk to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Tichelaar explores a literary tradition whose characters reflect our greatest fears and deepest hopes. Readers will find here the revelation that not only are we all Gothic wanderers—but we are so only by our own choosing.

“The Gothic Wanderer shows us the importance of its title figure in helping us to see our own imperfections and our own sometimes contradictory yearnings to be both unique and yet a part of a society. The reader is in for an insightful treat.”

— Diana DeLuca, Ph.D. and author of Extraordinary Things

“Make no mistake about it, The Gothic Wanderer is an important, well researched and comprehensive treatise on some of the world’s finest literature.